How do you hold on to your ambitions in sustainability initiatives?

The goal of ANCHOR is to develop cities that are resilient, circular, integrated, sustainable and social. This is done by investigating applications in water reuse in the built environment from different perspectives: technical, social, administrative and economic. A range of cases have been included on the agenda in order to examine existing initiatives. The sustainable housing project De Nieuwe Dokken in Ghent is the first step.

Image 1. De Nieuwe Dokken in Ghent is one of the initiatives being studied to design sustainable and circular water and energy supplies on the neighbourhood scale.

A lot of time and energy

There were interviews with stakeholders from a wide range of parties: from the drinking water company to a cooperative that provides residents with sustainability services. “That made it clear how much time and energy these key people invest in the project,” Starke says. “They make sure everything moves ahead and keep an eye on the overall picture. When they run up against resistance, they devise creative solutions to maintain momentum.” Fellow researcher Noor van Dooren adds: “During the interviews, we used a specially developed framework in order to identify the roles of key people, the ‘agents of change’. For example, you might have a visionary, a networker or someone who is good at resource acquisition. These are all roles that are indispensable at some point in the process. Obviously, we still have to work out all the data, but it was really helpful to have people recognise themselves in the roles and, in addition, get them to assign roles to other leaders.”

Image 2. KWR researchers Noor van Dooren (left) and Linde Janssen (right) talking to an ‘agent of change’.

Leading the way

For the researchers, one of the striking results of the interviews was that all the interviewees agreed about how the Nieuwe Dokken project has developed. In this case, the request for the building of a sustainable neighbourhood came from the municipality. But the operational side was primarily the responsibility of private bodies. There was a lot of continuity in terms of the people involved. After Ghent, the cases on the agenda in 2025 will be in the Netherlands, Germany and Sweden. Starke: “I can hardly wait to see how, in comparable cases in different contexts, people go about leading the way, and what the impact is on the ambitions of those projects.”

Public design for water

The ANCHOR project fits in beautifully with one of the social agendas that KWR focuses on: Public design for water. This theme looks at processes of change, which are often not very streamlined. “The cases we analyse often have to negotiate a complicated reality,” explains Starke. “The projects involve a design approach and they are exceptionally complex. In addition to technical challenges, the things that also have to be considered include political-administrative processes and the wishes of residents. These are not purely technical projects that can be thought about in terms of linear cause-and-effect relationships. Our research makes it clear that the administrative world works according to a different logic. We hope that a greater insight into that administrative logic will allow people to feel more at ease. The people involved will then be in a better position to cope with setbacks and won’t get disillusioned when things work differently than they imagined beforehand. That can only help on projects of this kind.”

Collaboration

The three-year ANCHOR-project was awarder in April 2023  as part of the EU’s INTERREG programme. The European project is a collaboration between KWR, Waternet and partners from Flanders, Germany and Sweden. ANCHOR is also financed by WiCE, the collective research programme of the drinking water companies at the interface of water, energy, raw materials and environment.